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ALBANY — New York’s complex of 54 state prison facilities is struggling to fill vacant jobs for nurses, doctors and other health care providers.
Filling those vacancies and dealing with an aging prison population at facilities across the state have become among the tallest challenges for the $3 billion correctional system, top administrators concede.Read More

Melissa Hall couldn’t hold her partner’s hand, so, as she wheezed through painful contractions and obeyed the nurse’s directives to push, push, push, she squeezed the chain shackling her to the hospital bed.
When Hall, then 25, went into labor in April 2013, she was two months into a year-long sentence at the Milwaukee County Jail.Read More

“Prisoner” by Ade McOren-Campbell
The United States has the shameful reputation of being the world’s largest jailer, and as the Prison Policy Initiative reported in March, 2017, 2.3 million people are currently locked up in prisons and jails. This mass incarceration continues in spite of the fact that a Brennan Center for Justice report shows that crime is down and rates remain near historic lows.Read More

Cast & crew of “Mariposa and the Saint: Ray Huth, Julia Steele Allen (co-author), Michi Ilona Osato, and Tyrrell Muhammad of the CA. Photo credit: Naj Wikoff
Imagine living in and being confined 23 hours a day to an 8-by-14-foot space, which includes your bed, wash basin and toilet. Imagine living there anywhere from 30 days to 30 years.Read More

Like many women, Monique Hidalgo, 33, simply wanted to breastfeed her 5-week-old baby, Isabella. Not as simply, Hidalgo is an inmate at a state prison in New Mexico. Hidalgo, who had breastfed her previous children, desired to breastfeed when the baby’s father brought her to the prison for weekend visits. But the guards would not allow it.Read More

Yes, there are people who, given choices, will always choose a life of crime. But there are also people who choose a life of crime because they feel they have no other options. College education for prison inmates can offer another choice and a second chance. New York State’s expansion of educational programming at 17 state prisons is a good idea.Read More

The Federal Bureau of Prisons issued a memo earlier this month explicitly requiring prisons to provide a range of tampons and pads to incarcerated women, free of charge.
While federal prisons already provide limited amounts of feminine hygiene products to inmates at no cost, the availability and quality of supplies vary from facility to facility.Read More

Police lockups will be required to have tampons, sanitary napkins on hand
ALBANY — Police lockups will be required to have feminine-hygiene products on hand for female detainees under a new state rule adopted Wednesday.
The rule from the state Commission of Correction mandates that tampons and sanitary napkins shall be made available to all female detainees at a facility’s expense.Read More

Federal and local prosecutors said on Wednesday that there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges in the 2015 death of a prisoner at the Fishkill Correctional Facility who died after an altercation with a group of guards there.
An autopsy classified the death of the inmate, Samuel Harrell, 30, as a homicide, and the prison had long been identified by inmate advocates as a place where officers routinely abused inmates.Read More

This story is the seventh piece in the Truthout series, Severed Ties: The Human Toll of Prisons. This series dives deeply into the impact of incarceration on families, loved ones and communities, demonstrating how the United States' incarceration of more than 2 million people also harms many millions more -- including 2.7 million children.Read More